💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › michel-onfray-on-palante.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:47:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: On Palante Author: Michel Onfray Date: 1990 Language: en Topics: egoist, France, Georges Palante, individualist Source: Retrieved on December 1, 2011 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/palante/onfray.htm Notes: Source: La Revolte individuelle. Actes du colloque Georges Palante. Paris, Folle Avoine, 1990; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor.
A philosopher is dead when he is no longer read. Some, then, know the
strange fortune of death while still alive. Others suffer through
periods of purgatory more or less long, during which their books sleep
on shelves, covered in dust and desolation. In order to awaken them from
this slumber an inspired hand is needed that will bring the ideas beck
to life, make the words dance and once again give intuitions their shine
of yesteryear. But forgotten ideas don’t always deserve this: if some
would gain by dying the day of their birth since they are old from the
time of their conception, others are of a marvelous actuality; they are
what Nietzsche calls the untimely — the always current because never
fashionable. Palante has known the solitude of libraries and
booksellers. He has caused happiness in those curious for singular,
original, lost texts. It has been possible to find here or there the old
editions with the green cover of the publisher Felix Alcan and then
discover a text that breaks with the current university philosophy. Far
from neo-Kantianism, that antiquity forever re-actualised, and the
futilities of a philosophy even more obsolete than that of the preceding
century, Palante manifests the permanence of a claim, a sensibility as
he termed it, which makes the individual the center of his concerns.
That his books were written in the first two decades of this century is
of almost no importance. Neither history nor the real can modify the
content of the Palantian word, for it is of a perpetual actuality,
stating, in the first place, that there exists a radical antimony
between the individual and society, and then choosing the camp of the
monad against the herd — against the multicolored cow, Nietzsche would
have said. And finally, it knows that the combat is of unequal
proportions, for the social always has the means of inflecting, if not
defeating, individualist flights. No matter. Palante knows that the
combat is hopeless, but heroism means fighting for the causes we know to
be just even if we know the results in advance. Palante’s individualism
is invigorating: it has nothing to do with today’s egoism, which revels
in a vulgar, low rent hedonism : consumerism, the hideous word we now
use. While the egoist sees nothing but himself, the individualist sees
nothing but individuals like himself, isolated, lost, bearers of an
obvious vacuity regarding the world. Palante calls for the rebellion of
the individual against herd tyrannies and institutions — these machines
destined for the production of the identical, of the one-dimensional man
who doesn’t much care for guerrilla fighters. We can understand why the
university wants nothing to do with Palante.
Palante for his part wouldn’t have wanted to be feted by the university,
and the rediscovery of his work is fortunately occurring on a different
path. The republishing of his books is not being carried out for
mercantile ends. It’s not being accompanied by the austerity of
eulogists who love to fall upon an opus like anatomists on a corpse.
Palante has been dusted off by people who love him because they find in
his writings an eternal pertinence, and because they know that it is
better to have teacher of life rather than one more commentator, however
brilliant he might be. In the cohort of philosophers we can distinguish
those who experience their thought and reflect upon their experiences
from others who just bend over paper. Palante took care to put his
existence in alignment with his philosophy, and from this angle the
result is less important than the determination of the project’s.
The colloquium was not an end, but a desire for genealogy, a birth date,
a beginning. It displeases the prigs of the university — who at times
loudly and clearly brandish their diplomas as guarantees of a pertinent
exegesis — to say that it is absolutely sterile to ask whether Palante
was a philosopher or not, if he thinks or not, if he read correctly this
or that philosopher of the classical repertory or not. Nor is it any
more important to know if he read the complete works of some Sorbonnard
scholar or the pamphlet of a trench worker of the concept. And in fact
some worthy representatives of the institution thought it correct to put
Palante on trial, suspected of dilettantism. Schopenhauer said all that
need be said on the subject of professors. Those who have again allowed
Palante to speak are singular beings who appreciate the freedom of his
word and spirit, his independent speech. Not caring to measure the works
of the philosopher by the measure of official or institutional criteria,
conscious despite it all of the imperfections that can be found here or
there in the complete works, the lovers of Palante have preferred to
linger over the positive rather than privileging that which is subject
to criticism. In this spirit, there cannot be a caste, a group
constituted around the works of Palante, but simply — and to quote an
author he admired — an association of egoists such as that which Stirner
envisioned, a contractual, passing alliance, revocable at any moment,
between individuals who share, the time of a colloquium, the same
aspiration to rub their ideas against those of a singular author. And so
there won’t be a Society of the Friends of Georges Palante! Let us leave
this to the lovers of societies and herds Ă la Panurge who gather
together in order to compensate for a singular lack of strength...